Spring snow improves wheat outlook

Wheat receiving spring moisture has benefited but still has a long road ahead to make it to harvest, experts say.

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By Candace KrebsContributing Writer

LA Junta Tribune - La Junta, CO

By Candace KrebsContributing Writer

Posted Mar. 19, 2013 at 6:00 AM

By Candace KrebsContributing Writer

Posted Mar. 19, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Wheat receiving spring moisture has benefited but still has a long road ahead to make it to harvest, experts say.

“Better late than never. We need to start replenishing the moisture sometime,” said Terry Hodgson, district conservationist with the Natural Resource Conservation Service in Anthony, Kan., and advisor to the South Central Kansas Residue Alliance.

“The wheat around here looks pretty sad,” he added. “I think it’s going to be very susceptible to diseases because of the stress it’s gone through.”

Jim Shroyer, Kansas State University extension agronomist, said wheat crop conditions improved following February’s snows, although he cautioned that the future crop was far from being out of the woods so early in the season.

“We have no subsoil moisture,” he said. “This year our wheat will be living hand-to-mouth.”

How spring conditions unfold will be critical, he said.

“Adequate moisture and below average temperatures — that’s what wheat really likes,” he said. “Last year in January and February we were 4 degrees above normal temperatures. This year we are just slightly above normal, and that’s a good thing.”

The storms in late February, though widespread, didn’t help all parts of the region equally. In Colorado, the storms brought a slight improvement to the snowpack that is critical to next year’s irrigation water supplies, boosting it to 73 percent of normal, while piling up welcome drifts in fields along the Front Range.

Jim Cooksey, who farms near Roggen, didn’t mind having to navigate around the drifts on his way into town. “I am very happy,” he said.

Farther east, however, large swaths of the Plains received little benefit.

“All we got was the wind and the cold,” said Bruce Fickenscher, extension agent for southeastern Colorado, an area where the drought has been particularly intense.

It’s so dry in Eads, Colo., where his office is based, that grass is dying and native pastures have started blowing, he said.

“We’ve had a couple of pretty ugly days out here,” he said.

Desperate farmers have chiseled up clods in their fields to protect the soil surface from wind erosion, with minimal success.

“It’s just a band-aid,” Fickenscher said.

With 2012 the state’s hottest year in recorded history and Colorado and surrounding states racking up records for dryness as well, Darrell Hanavan, executive director of Colorado Wheat, called wheat-growing conditions on the High Plains “historic.” This winter, Colorado’s wheat was rated the poorest it’s been since 1995. A third of the wheat acreage in Colorado and Kansas was considered poor to very poor going into the spring, with neighboring Oklahoma and Nebraska faring even worse.

Page 2 of 2 - Bruce Bosley, a Colorado State University cropping specialist, said a wheat crop needs good fall rooting but too much vegetative growth over the winter depletes valuable soil moisture. In many cases, wheat vegetation was minimal this winter, but in some areas, the crop never emerged at all.

Neil Hansen, a CSU soil and crop management specialist, said the most important time for wheat to get moisture is very early in the fall at the beginning of stand establishment.

“That doesn’t look too favorable for us right now,” he said.

Another critical time is early in the spring when wheat breaks dormancy, he added. His calculations show it takes 6 inches of rain to make the first bushel of yield. Each additional inch of water adds roughly 5 bushels of potential yield.

“The only way to get more yield is to get more water,” he said.

The shot of moisture that hit the Great Plains in late February was promising enough to drop wheat prices on the Chicago Board of Trade to ten-month lows.